City and cosmology: genetics, health, and urban living in Dubai

In light of increasingly high rates of diabetes, heart disease, and obesity among citizens of the Arabian Gulf, popular health discourse in the region has emphasised the emergent Arab genome as the primary etiological basis of major health conditions. However, after many years of public dissemination of genomic knowledge in the region, and widespread acceptance of this knowledge among Gulf Arab citizens, the rates of chronic illness continue to increase. This paper briefly explores the clash between indigenous Islamic knowledge systems and biomedical knowledge systems imported into the United Arab Emirates. It presents vignettes collected from interviews and participant observation in Dubai as part of nearly four years of ethnographic research, completed as part of the author's doctoral work on ‘Anxiety and Identity in Southeast Arabia’. Rather than radically informing health seeking behaviours among many UAE citizens, the emphasis on the ‘Arab Genome’ has instead reconfirmed the authority of Bedouin cosmological understandings of disease, reshaping the language that people use to engage with their bodies and their health. Local cosmology remains a powerful discursive element that often operates in contention, in sometimes powerfully subtle ways, with novel health initiative regimes. For many people in the region, genomic information, as it is often discussed and propagated in the UAE, shares an intimate relationship with ideas of fate and national identity, and sometimes serves to mitigate the increasingly uncertain terms of engagement that people share between the body, their health, and rapidly changing urban landscapes

The Center for Human-Wildlife Conflict Resolution at Virginia Tech: A Model of Future Use

The Center for Human-Wildlife Conflict Resolution, located at Virginia Tech, was created in mid-2004 to bring together representatives of state and federal agencies, private sector practitioners, non-governmental organizations, researchers, educators, and other stakeholders common to most human-wildlife conflicts as a means to facilitate and expedite the process of attaining realistic and publicly acceptable solutions to human-wildlife conflicts. The Center has four critical missions: coordination, information transfer, research, and training. Participating partners (i.e., members) in the Center adopted upon an Advisory Board organizational model and operate under a “majority rule” protocol. Increased awareness and understanding of the missions, regulatory mandates, and responsibilities and limitations of each member organization were an immediate outcome of early coordination efforts; knowledge of the experiences and individual strengths of partners immediately helped to improve relations among participating members and strengthen both the services provided and competitiveness when seeking funding support. A reduction of duplication of effort among agencies and organizations, reduced costs, and development and delivery of a consistent, science-based message to clients are other benefits realized to date. A new educational web site was developed and immediately has become the “go to” resource for information on human-wildlife conflicts in the Commonwealth. Training and education programs for professionals have been designed and offered to improve the quality of service available to the public and to enhance the professional development of practitioners (i.e., attaining and/or maintaining professional certification). Although the circumstances that lead to the creation of this Center in Virginia may not be present or similar in all states, the approach of using an impartial, unbiased, third party entity to unify and coordinate the response taken to such conflicts may be of interest to other states

Any Time? Any Place? The impact on student learning of an on-line learning environment.

Original paper can be found at: http://www.actapress.com/Content_of_Proceeding.aspx?proceedingID=292#pages Copyright ACTA Press [Full text of this paper is not available in the UHRA]An increasing number of HE institutions are adopting virtual and managed learning environments (VLEs and MLEs), which offer flexible access to on-line learning materials all day and every day. There are multiple claims about e-learning enhancing learning and teaching (eg. [1] Britain and Liber, 1999; [2]Conole, 2002; [4]Allen, 2003; [5]Littlejohn and Higginson, 2003) such as supporting active learning, facilitative rather than didactic teaching and increased student motivation but these are not pre determined outcomes. Much depends on how lecturers use the available technology and how students respond to that use. This paper reports on a research project which has evaluated the students' own experience of on-line learning at the University of Hertfordshire. Using its own institution-wide MLE (StudyNet) academic staff at the university have been able to offer students on-line access to their study material from September 2001. Activities available for students using StudyNet include participating in discussion forums, using formative assessment materials and accessing journal articles as well as viewing and downloading courseware for each of their courses. Students were invited to participate in a questionnaire and focus groups to identify the characteristics of the on-line learning environment which benefited their learning

Being, being human, becoming beyond human

The London-based New Scientist Magazine has been publishing popular science and technology news since 1956. Each year it holds a large four-day conference in London, called ‘New Scientist Live,’ hosting talks and exhibitions from many of Europe’s leading innovators and scientists, and attracting tens of thousands of visitors. The exhibition and speaker’s space is divided into five main stage areas: Cosmos, Earth, Humans, Technology, and Engineering. While these categories have always overlapped to varying degrees, their distinctions are increasingly becoming blurred. This imbrication of the body and manufactured forms invites new biosocial approaches to investigating the role of materials within the sociality of the body. The body has, to varying degrees, always been manipulated and ‘made’

Making A Martian Home: Finding Humans On Mars Through Utopian Architecture

A renewed public and state interest in space exploration in recent years, coupled with technological advancements in rocket science and architectural systems, has made design and engineering initiatives for Martian living tangible and urgent. This article traces the practice of utopian architectural design of a home on Mars. This home has been described by its architects as a ‘place for people’ and for ‘all of humanity’. Off-Earth habitats have traditionally been designed with emphasis on the functionality of surviving extreme environments. New designs for Mars aim to make human-centric homes in which people can be comfortable. However, when confronted with the known realities of the Martian landscape, such designs reconfigure the place and form of the human. The Martian landscape requires that a home shelters the human body from hostile elements through totalising closed loop architectural systems. In such extreme architecture, the human form is configured as a calculable body, and becomes ‘erased’. This article ethnographically traces how the human is imagined in such design practice and asks what happens to the idea of the human through informed design thinking as architects meet space scientists. It traces how utopic motivations to build a space ‘for all humanity’ are challenged through the material and practical reality of making design choices and exclusions. The ethnography follows the figure of the human as it is imagined as an emergent Martian lifeform which confronts the problems of the different gravity, light, radiation, and terrain that a life on mars would entail. Considering how the concept of ‘living’ might be possible in a future Martian habitat involves the practice of imagining radically alternative forms of life. By tracing how these are imagined, contested, and considered this article asks how practices of conceptualising radical alterity relate to understanding oneself as connected to the enduring idea of being human

Towards an anthropology of gravity: Emotion and embodiment in microgravity environments

Human space travel has largely been understood through a physiological and psychological lens but rarely sociologically or anthropologically. Drawing on astronaut testimony, experiences of microgravity environments, laboratory experiments and art practice this paper argues that gravity, or rather its absence, offers a unique vantage point through which to consider the human relationship to emotion, cognition, and the curation of social relations via experiences of the body in different gravitational environments. The analysis draws attention to the contextual, embodied and contingent moments of social relations through using a holistic materialist position with theories of affect and work on the anthropology of the body. An anthropology of gravity recognises the ethno-physical conditions of space-living by showing that microgravity environments disturb the habitual affective landscapes of human interaction. It suggests that body, emotion, social relations and environment can be better understood when they are contextualised by the underlying forces that operate subtly throughout them; forces that are more fully understood once they are no longer present

SURVEY OF BLACK BEAR DEPREDATION IN AGRICULTURE IN MASSACHUSETTS

Black bear (Ursus americanus) depredation in agriculture has become an increasing concern in Massachusetts. Complaints from apiarists, corn growers, and livestock producers have increased 167% during the period 1980 to 1990, but whether this increase truly represents more depredation, response of bears to other factors, or simply better reporting/record keeping has not been determined. The bear population in Massachusetts from 1984 to 1989 increased 50°/a to approximately 700-750 animals statewide. Subsequent estimates (1995) have placed the bear population around 1,200 animals. Concurrent encroachment of human development into prime bear habitat also increased contact between bears and humans. During years when natural foods (primarily hard and soft mast) are limited, bears search for alternate foods in nearby agricultural and suburban areas and may damage hives, crops, or livestock. All these factors enhance the potential for conflicts that could jeopardize human-bear co-existence

STATISTICAL CONSIDERATIONS WHEN USING HYSTERESIS TO ESTIMATE INTERNAL HEAT LOAD IN DAIRY COWS

Water is often used to manage heat stress in dairy cattle. Sprinklers are often placed over the feed bunk or used while cattle are waiting to be milked, however in this experiment cattle were given control over water with a cow-activated shower. Previous studies have focused on how wetting can lower body emperature or reduce respiration rates. An alternative way to investigate this management practice is to examine internal heat loads. Internal heat load can be quantified by fitting a hysteresis loop to daily field data. The hysteresis loop is formed by a phase diagram of body temperature versus an environmental input. Internal heat load is the area inside the loop. The area can be estimated using a number of environmental measures. In this paper three environmental measures are considered: ambientair temperature, the temperature-humidity index and the heat-load index. The two stage harmonic least squares methodis used to estimate internal heat load. Then a Bayesian MCMC model is used to predict internal heat load using the environmental inputs and test the effectiveness of allowing shower access on internal heat load reduction. Voluntary use of a shower reduces internal heat load and the strength of this effect increases with the degree of the heat challenge

ESTIMATING AREA AND LAG ASSOCIATED WITH THERMAL HYSTERESIS IN CATTLE

Thermal hysteresis in cattle becomes visible when the phase diagram of body temperature (Tb) vs ambient temperature (Ta) exhibits a loop. The hysteresis loop shows a rotated elliptical pattern which depends on the lag between Tb and Ta. The area of the loop can be used to quantify the amount of heat stress during thermal challenge. Three methods to estimate the area and lag of the elliptical hysteresis loop are: linear least squares method, ellipse-specific nonlinear least squares method, and Lapshin’s analytical method. Linear least squares method uses residual least squares to estimate the coefficients of the ellipse for which the sum of the squares of the distances to the observations is minimal. The estimated coefficients can be used to calculate both the rotated angle and area of the ellipse. The ellipse-specific method is based on quadratic constrained least mean squares fitting to simultaneously determine the best elliptical fit for a set of scattered data. It provides estimates of the rotated angle and semi-major and semi-minor axes to calculate the area of the ellipse. Lapshin’s analytical method is a two-stage procedure that fits a sinusoidal function to the input and then the output. It provides parameters in addition to lag and area which further characterize the hysteresis loop. The area and lag along with their standard errors are compared for the three methods using the delta method and bootstrapping. The delta method is used to calculate the standard errors of the derived parameter estimates and bootstrapping is used to assess the appropriateness of the delta method

Knowledge transfer and exchange: a look at the literature in relation to research and policy

Within the field of health policy, there have been widespread calls for the increased or improved use of evidence within policy making. This reflects an ambition to deliver better policy in terms of outcomes, resource efficiency and effectiveness, and a belief that this can be achieved through utilising the available evidence to inform and guide decision making. For those tasked with improving the uptake of a piece or body of evidence, for policy makers aiming to improve their evidence use, or for researches investigating this question, a number of conceptual questions remain on how to actually achieve this, such as: What should count as evidence for policy making? Who should govern (or steer) the use of research evidence for policy? What is ‘good evidence’ for decision making? What is the ‘good use’ of evidence from a governance perspective? How is research knowledge typically translated into policy? How can one ‘improve’ the use or uptake of evidence in policy making? The GRIP-Health Project is a 5 year, European Research Council supported programme of work that aims to improve the use of research evidence in health policy through undertaking research on the political aspects of health policy making and evidence use. The project has developed a number of working papers that engage with some of these topics.1 This current paper is concerned with the last two of the questions listed above, specifically reviewing key aspects of Knowledge Transfer and Exchange (KTE) related to getting research into policy and practice. While the health sector is increasingly motivated by a desire to get research evidence into policy, outside the field of health there is a much broader body of work that is specifically concerned with how evidence and knowledge are transferred, translated, or taken up by different policy actors. Various theories attempt to establish how KTE works, the contextual factors that influence the process, and how to achieve maximum impact for relevant bodies of evidence. Acronyms and terminology used in this field vary accordingly, and can include knowledge transfer, knowledge translation, knowledge management, and knowledge brokering. These various terms have been grouped together under the rubric ‘K*’ by some authors to reflect the multiple overlapping terms 2 Prior working papers in this series deal with aspects of: Stewardship of health evidence; hierarches and appropriateness of evidence; and institutional approaches to evidence uptake research. Working papers and other outputs of the programme are available at the GRIP-Health website http://www.lshtm.ac.uk/groups/griphealth/resources/index.html 3 (c.f. Shaxson et al., 2012). However, in this paper, we use the term KTE to refer to the general body of literature focused on issues of knowledge production, dissemination, uptake and use in policymaking. As the body of work on KTE is extensive, it was decided not to attempt a complete or systematic review of the literature. There are, however, several papers which attempt to synthesise the existing literature or systematically review elements of the KTE field. These reviews provide a starting point for mapping the field to help inform efforts to improve the use of research evidence in policy. The current paper therefore has two objectives. First, it summarises and synthesises a set of identified KTE review papers in order to undertake a comparison of their similarities and their differences on the main areas they cover, to provide a basic mapping of key KTE concepts. After this, it then explores some key themes that emerge from the KTE literature which are of particular relevance to the GRIP-Health programme and other researchers or stakeholders who are tasked with improving evidence uptake